Political deep integration continues apace. The Liberal government is in the process of passing an extraordinary piece of legislation, C-23, which effectively cedes Canadian sovereignty to U.S. border officials.

Under this Bill, expected to pass shortly, Canadians can be held for interrogation by U.S. border guards at airports, even if we decide we’ve had enough hostile questioning about our religion, political views, social media habits, or mode of dress, and decide to stay in Canada after all. If we try to get up and leave at that point, or decide we don’t want to answer more questions, we will be breaking Canadian law, and liable for arrest, conviction and imprisonment. Meanwhile, Canadian border officials in American airports will now have the right to prevent Canadian permanent residents from boarding an aircraft.

At a stroke, what we assumed were basic civic rights are being whisked away by the Trudeau government. American authorities will be able to detain Canadian citizens on Canadian soil, and the Liberals are making it a crime for us to refuse to co-operate. And just as American green-card holders are being harassed and blocked at U.S. airports, so Canada is now following suit against its own permanent residents, who – until now – had the unfettered right to enter Canada.

Pre-clearance has, of course, been a convenient way of entering the U.S. Better to be refused here than have to pay your way back from there. But this new law will apply, as noted, even to Canadians who change their minds about traveling to the U.S. after getting a taste of the Orange Era from a sneering American immigration official. It’s worth reiterating: you won’t just be able to walk away. You will remain under American authority, in Canada, and if you resist or refuse to answer an American interrogator’s questions, you can be prosecuted – by Canada.

This may seem to some like small potatoes. Most Canadians don’t fly to the U.S. Most who do are unlikely to be harassed at the border. But it is wrong, I think, to dismiss this move so easily. Giving Americans the right to detain Canadians on our own land, and subjecting the latter to prosecution if we fail to comply, is a significant break from the past. Does anyone believe that U.S. pressure will stop there and that more concessions won’t be made?

The United States continues to embarrass.

The delegates were appalled by the lack of gender equality in America. They found the U.S. to be lagging far behind international human rights standards in a number of areas, including its 23 percent gender pay gap, maternity leave, affordable child care and the treatment of female migrants in detention centers.

The most telling moment of the trip, the women told reporters on Friday, was when they visited an abortion clinic in Alabama and experienced the hostile political climate around women’s reproductive rights.

“We were harassed. There were two vigilante men waiting to insult us,” said Frances Raday, the delegate from the U.K. The men repeatedly shouted, “You’re murdering children!” at them as soon as they neared the clinic, even though Raday said they are clearly past childbearing age.

“It’s a kind of terrorism,” added Eleonora Zielinska, the delegate from Poland. “To us, it was shocking.”

In most European countries, she explained, abortions are performed at general doctors’ offices and hospitals that offer all kinds of other health services, so there aren’t protesters waiting to heckle the women who enter.

The women discovered during their visit that women in the United States have “missing rights” compared to the rest of the world. For instance, the U.S. is one of three countries in the world that does not guarantee women paid maternity leave. The U.N. suggests that countries guarantee at least 14 weeks of paid parental leave. Some countries go further – Iceland requires five months paid leave for each parent, and an additional two months to be shared between them.

“The lack of accommodation in the workplace to women’s pregnancy, birth and post-natal needs is shocking,” Raday said. “Unthinkable in any society, and certainly one of the richest societies in the world.”

Happy Valentine’s Day. Why don’t you celebrate it by spending more time with the glorious #BlackGaySlay hashtag

Transcription of an interview with Mark Bray from WNYC’s On the Media – Feb. 10, 2017

“Brooke: But not just that, right? Antifa is fundamentally against the right of fascists to speak and be heard.

Mark: That’s entirely correct. So, in your open you mentioned the popular slogan that liberals have adopted from Voltaire that, “I may disagree with what you have to say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Anti-fascists fundamentally disagree with that premise. They argue that, given the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the destruction that Nazis have caused, that fascists, white supremacists shouldn’t be granted the right to express their ideas in public, in part because, they argue, had that been done earlier in the 1920s, the 1930s, we might have been able to bypass what ended up happening.

Brooke: I get that as a tactic, but I’m still not sure how the philosophy of anti-fascism squares with the liberal values of free speech and open dialogue, and I guess it doesn’t.

Mark: To some extent, it doesn’t. The question is: if we want to prevent something along the lines of what happened in the 1930s and 40s from happening again, how do we do it? And the liberal prescription for doing it is, essentially, free and open debate and dialogue, and if Nazis do something illegal then hopefully the police will stop them. Anti-fascists recognize that in the 1930s, 1940s, the police supported fascism. The fascists didn’t actually stage a revolution to come to power; they worked within the political system. And all the reasonable dialogue and debate that one could muster did not do the job. The argument is that, if we want such a horrific crime to not reoccur, it needs to be nipped in the bud.”

Do not forget how the media dehumanized him and tried to justify his murder

Do not forget how peaceful protests were painted as savage riots

Do not forget police armed with military grade weapons terrorized and arrested black civilians

Do not forget Darren Wilson being awarded over $400,000 in fundraiser donations for murdering an unarmed black child

Do not forget that this system was not built to defend us, but to control us

Saw this wonderful gentleman at the Böblingen bahnhof. The bit on his shoulders reads “Nazijäger” btw.

and it says “goodnight” to “white pride”

when a creepy guy was hitting on me one of them came over to ask me if the guy was bothering me and I said yes and he told the guy to piss off for me

“Listen to me– all of you out there! You were told by this man– your hero– that America is the greatest country in the world! He told you that Americans were the greatest people– that America could be refined like silver, could have the impurities hammered out of it, and shine more brightly! He went on about how precious America was – how you needed to make sure it remained great! And he told you anything was justified to preserve that great treasure, that pearl of great price that is America!

“Well, I say America is nothing! Without its ideals– its commitment to the freedom of all men, America is a piece of trash! A nation is nothing! A flag is a piece of cloth! I fought Adolf Hitler not because America was great, but because it was fragile! I knew that liberty could be snuffed out here as in Nazi Germany! As a people, we were no different than them! When I returned, I saw that you nearly did turn American into nothing! And the only reason you’re not less then nothing– is that it’s still possible for you to bring freedom back to America!”

This is where it all started.

What radical black womanist politics organized around self-defense actually looks like, and why it matters.

There was no wild rhetoric about “killing whitey” or clandestine plots to ambush and torture cops when I attended a political education class hosted by Dallas’s Black Women’s Defense League last year. Instead, there were a lot of women of color speaking from the heart, telling one another how they felt when they walk down the street alone, sharing the fears they had for their children growing up in America today. Some of these sisters rocked kente cloth with dreads, while others had weaves and perms and wore skirts and heels. A few of the women were DECIDEDLY old school: They were alive when the original Black Panthers stormed the California State Capitol building with shotguns in 1967. But there were millennials on hand, too—ladies with hip-hop songs paused on their iPhones and books like The New Jim Crow tucked into their purses.

The Black Women’s Defense League first popped up on my radar thanks in part to its red, black, and green logo, which features a woman with an afro toting a shotgun. After flipping through photos of the founder, Niecee X, brandishing firearms on social media, I couldn’t help relating to the group’s advocacy of firearms for self-defense. Even though I’ve never owned a gun, I’ve certainly thought about it, tempted by the illusion ofSECURITY it might offer in a country where someone like George Zimmerman, a vigilante who took a young black life like mine on a whim, can walk away scot free. But prior to actually meeting with the group, I failed to grasp the scope of the issues they grapple with. As Ibora Ase, one core member of the Black Women’s Defense League, put it to me, black women don’t just have to fight “the man—we have to fight our men.”

Niecee, the Defense League’s leader, defies easy caricature. There is a distinct elegance on display in her perfectly posed Instagram selfies, where she mixes militant-fatigues, African prints, and exuberant hair styles that run the color spectrum from cherry red to Frank Ocean blond. Above all,THOUGH, she’s stern and fastidious when it comes to her work as an advocate for black women—leading the core members of her group in self-defense training sessions, charity work in the community, and outreach to the at-risk youths of Dallas.

Her grandmother gave Niecee the politics bug when she was still a kid. “I knew all of the senators and who the Republicans were,” she said. “I was really drinking the Kool-Aid for a minute.” But it was in her early 20s that sheFOUND her way activism through local black groups in Dallas like Guerilla Mainframe and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, which introduced her to radical organizing.

It was only about two years ago that she broke off from those groups after a series of personal and professional incidents that begged for an organization specifically focused on obstacles faced by women of color. “There were issues with an individual that I had been dealing with romantically,” she said of a man she met within Dallas’s black activist community, “and there was some violence that occurred between him and me.”

Niecee said that she was pregnant at the time and the alleged violence led to her losing a child. But what compelled her to start the Defense League wasn’t a single act of malice so much as how the Huey P. Newton Gun Club handled her abuse allegations when she brought them to the attention of leadership.

“There has to be a hard line drawn within our communities and for each other that this isn’t something that will be tolerated, and even further that when it does happen, if it does happen, that it will be dealt with swiftly and dealt with in a way that will ensure it does not occur again,” she told me.

In an email, the co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, Babu Omowale, said that because the alleged violence took place before Niecee was an official member of HPNGC, it wasn’t their problem. He questioned whether it had happened at all and added that his organization offered Niecee a tribunal with a council of elders to resolve the situation, an offer she refused. After her refusal, Niecee was excommunicated from the group. (Niecee told me her refusal was based on her wariness that the tribunal would be run predominantly by men who might not be sensitive to her concerns as a women. This is the same wariness that led her not to report the allegations to the authorities.)

After I REACHED out to Omowale for comment, he posted an irate note on Facebook that publicly criticized Niecee for talking to “craKKKas media.” Referring to the Defense League, he said that it is “unfortunate you have to fight your own before the enemy… you and your gay ass feminist group can burn in hell.”

The episode speaks to how, even within the “woke” community of radical black activists in 2017, there is still much to be done on gender equality. As Ase put it, there's SOMETIMES a desire to “keep things in house” in the black community. The problem is, if we don’t we start talking about these issues—which plague all American communities, but can be particularly threatening to black women—many more people are going to be hurt, and the movement as a whole will be held back.